Your Lack (Or Surfeit) Of Sleep Is Making You Old

You cannot cheat Sleep, and you cannot make it up to him: “Turns out, folks who get less than seven hours a night have accelerated aging in the brain, according to a study published last week in the journal Sleep. Their cognitive function is on par with someone who is three to seven years older. Surprisingly, getting too much sleep — more than nine hours a night — also appears to be linked to speeding the brain’s aging process.”

Speaking of Sleep, which I have apparently decided is a man, it is also affected by being burned out (also known as “exhaustion syndrome.”)

Although burnout is not recognized as a distinct psy­chiatric disorder, it seems to cause a unique profile of changes to neurological functioning, ac­cording to work by psychologist Agneta Sandström of Umeå University in Sweden. Sandström compared women with burnout, known formally as exhaustion syndrome, to women with major depression, and she found subtle but significant differences between the two groups. For instance, both groups of women had sleep difficulties, but women with depression reported waking too early, whereas women with chronic burnout had difficulties falling asleep.

Sandström also asked healthy women and those with ex­haustion syndrome and major depression to complete a work­ing-memory test. Both depressed and burned-out women found it hard to focus and remember simple details, compared with control women. But women with exhaustion syndrome had even lower brain activity, measured by functional MRI, during these memory tests than depressed women did.

Calm down and get some rest, I guess. I mean, you’re not going to, but it is probably soothing to think that you could. [Sleep link via]

Photo by reonis, from Flickr.